Exposing the Terrorism Trap

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Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:08:05 -0500

Exposing the Terrorism Trap

 

 

 

 

 

Exposing the Terrorism Trap

an interview with Michael Parenti

by David Ross

 

 

 

 

David Ross

I'd like to start out with the title of your new book. What do you

mean by the terrorism " trop?

 

Michael Parenti

The acts of terrorism that took place on September 11 must be seen in

a wider context. The reason these people attacked us are twofold.

First there are the immediate causes. They're driven by an apocalyptic

religious ideology. But at the same time the question comes up, " Why

did they attack the United States? " Bush says it's because we're so

free and prosperous. Well, Denmark is a lot freer and a lot more

prosperous than we are, so is Sweden, so are a number of other Western

European countries, but they are not being attacked in this same way.

So we must try to look at the larger conditional causes of terrorism.

 

The terrorist groups that have arisen in the Middle East and Central

Asia have emerged from societies in which all popular coalitions and

democratic movements have been destroyed by U.S. interventionism:

Turkey, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia,

Pakistan, and others. In country after country where democratic forces

have tried to mobilize for political and economic democracy, where

student leaders, labor union leaders, farm and peasant communal

collective leaders, independent journalist, liberal clergy, women's

rights advocates, various groups of people who have fought for social

change in a democratic direction, these reformist democratic forces

have been the object of the worst sort of oppression over the last

half century. Democratic interests have been destroyed or left with

nothing to hold on to.

 

Finding their economies, their cultures, and their societies spinning

or sinking beyond their grasp, finding themselves with no control over

their lives, many of these people, in a mixture of hope and

desperation, turn to a kind of totalizing religious solution. One that

actually preaches direct action and revenge against the evil empire,

in this case, as they see it, America. But it's really not America

that's doing this to them, it's the U.S. ruling class. America itself

is a entity of 260 million people, of many diverse groups most of whom

do not want to see their tax dollars expended and the blood of their

sons and daughters spilled in far off places, the names of which they

don't even know, and usually cannot even find on the map. They wonder

why so much is spent on war and so little on things like local

education. Their schools are falling apart. The roof on the school is

leaking and the kids don't have sufficient textbooks, and school

materials. And that's not just in inner cities. I know schools in

California, in suburban areas, where the art teachers go out with

their own money and buy art supplies for the students because the

budgets have been cut back so much. And they're wondering why we have

so much public poverty and so much private wealth, so much civilian

poverty and so much military glut and military wealth.

 

U.S. Ieaders have built military bases all over the world. It seems

U.S. forces have got to be everywhere, all over the world, occupying

countries from Bosnia to Macedonia, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to

Tashkent, more and more places at the taxpayer's expense. Meanwhile

the quality of life in the U.S. is being neglected and deteriorating.

So it's not really true that Americans are clamoring for empire.

Despite the monopoly propaganda of the corporate media and national

security state, Americans do at times question the terrible costs and

burdens of empire. But during times of crises, real or fabricated, our

leaders manage to convince people to rally mindlessly around the flag,

telling them, " this is for democracy, " " this is for our national

security, " " we've got to do this to fight terrorism. " Well, what's

happened? U.S. forces went into Afghanistan, destroying much of that

already battered country-all supposedly to catch Osama bin Laden. They

never caught him, and now they say, " Oh that's not very important

anyway, we don't really have to catch him. " The White House is now

predicting that al Qaeda is planning some other terrorist strikes of

major magnitude, coming soon. So what exactly was accomplished by

waging war upon a weak impoverished battered country? People say,

" Well what would you do? I would go out and hunt the terrorist cells,

specifically. I wouldn't go out and bomb whole cities and villages.

That's like trying to catch a flea with a giant sledgehammer. But that

policy has served George Bush and his reactionaries in Washington

quite well under the guise of this terrorism battle. While the rest of

us, you and I, saw September 11 as a horrible, horrible tragedy, they

saw it as a golden opportunity and they've been pushing their

reactionary agenda ever since. The first thing George II did to fight

terrorism after September 11, was to call for an additional tax cut

for the very rich. And the next thing he did was to jack up the

military budget even more, another 50 billion until now it's dose to

400 billion dollars. None of this enhances our security against terrorism.

 

What are the real motives behind US. foreign policy?

 

I believe the real motives behind most of U.S foreign policy-these may

not be the only concerns or the only interests-but the major basic

motives as measured by the kinds of countries U.S. Ieaders support and

the kinds of countries or political movements they try to destroy is

to keep the world safe for the Fortune 500. To make sure that the

transnational corporations and international global finance capital

continues to control the land, labor, resources, and markets of most

of the world, and ultimately, all of the world on terms that are

extremely favorable to them. The goal is to destroy, to obliterate, to

thwart any social movement or national leader who is trying for an

alternative way of using the land, the labor, the natural resources,

the markets, the capital of his or her country.

 

The most recent example is Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Why is Chavez

being portrayed as an unstable, wild-eyed demagogue? It's a very

repetitive, rather obvious and predictable formula. A country tries to

get out from under the U.S. global-dominated economic system. They

want to develop their own society in their own way and you immediately

begin to demonize their leaders. You talk about the leader being a

" mercurial strong arm, " " a strong man, " " erratic, " " dangerous, " " a

repressive autocrat, " " another Hitler, " " anti-American, " and

" anti-West. " But it doesn't make somebody anti-American if they

criticize U.S. policy and want to develop in their own way, a way that

would be more beneficial for their people. If I criticize U.S policy

and say, " I don't like what our leaders are doing in Iraq and

Yugoslavia, " " I don't like it bombing civilian populations, " that

doesn't make me anti-American. If I criticize what Israel is doing in

the West Bank, in Jenin, in Hebron and other places, that doesn't make

me anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic. That makes me anti- the particular

leaders who are making the particular policies in Israel or in the U.

S. right now.

 

I'm opposed to those policies. That's not being bigoted against

America, or Israel, or France, or China. If I don't like Chinese

policy in the business zones that they've set up and a number of

areas, that doesn't mean I'm an anti-Asian, and a racist against the

Chinese people. That is just a manipulative kind of labeling. To

oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the

country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such

opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or

democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your

leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and

criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the

Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey

whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler,

and look where it got them.

 

What are the domestic repercussions from the so-called " war on terror? "

 

I already alluded to some of them. The war on terror has enabled the

Bush Administration to ram through the USA PATRIOT Act, which defines

terrorism so broadly that one could almost say that the conversation

we are having right now is aiding and abetting terrorism, and they

could try to make a case against us. I'm not exaggerating. This " law "

gives the CIA the right, once again, to operate with domestic

surveillance, which they've never really stopped doing, which they've

been doing in the U.S. all through these years.

But now they can be less sub-rosa about it. They can be more open and

go and do whatever they want. It gives them the powers to suspend

habeas corpus, to suspend our civil rights whenever they want. Well

let me tell you, if under the guise of fighting terrorism they think

they're going to take away our right to dissent, and our right to a

trial by jury, and our right to freedom of assembly and freedom of

speech, they've got another thing coming because millions of people do

not agree with that hysterical, stupid, USA, so-called, PATRIOT Act.

It has nothing to do with patriotism. It is an act which that gaggle

of wimps they call the U.S. Congress stampeded and ran into line to

vote for by an overwhelming majority because they had to show

themselves as out there fighting terrorism.

 

What do you believe are the real structures of economic and political

power in the United States?

 

The real structures of economic and political power rest with the

powers of very big moneyed interests that finance right-wing think

tanks, pay the big paid lobbyists in Washington, and bankroll most of

the big elections. If you want to run for any really important federal

office-even for the U.S. House of Representatives-to wage a viable

electoral campaign in one congressional district now cost hundreds of

thousands of dollars.

 

The moneyed power also exists in a whole set of auxiliary

institutions. The representatives of corporate America sit on the

Boards of Regents, and Boards of Trustees that rule our universities

and colleges. Corporate America owns the major media. They control the

economy. They control the job market, the technology, interest rates,

financial institutions. They have tremendous influence over Congress.

People say, " Oh, do you have a conspiracy theory, do you think people

really gather together in a room and meet each other? " Certainly they

meet all the time. They meet at the Bohemian Grove and the Bohemian

Club in San Francisco. They meet at the Knickerbocker Club in New

York. They meet at the White House. They meet at the Council on

Foreign Relations. They meet at the Trilateral Commission and

elsewhere. They're constantly meeting and confabulating, and selecting

the right people for the right positions, the big policy-making

positions in government. They're constantly setting up policies, what

to do and how to do it and how this best protects the powers-that-be

and the money-that-is. They don't rule entirely the way they would

like to. If they ruled entirely as they'd like to, they would have

wiped out social security twenty years ago. They still have to deal

with the popular vote to some degree and these are precious democratic

rights.

 

That's about all we've got left, these few rights, and sometimes not

even that, as dissent is repressed or blocked out of the media. And

the vote is devalued when there's nobody worth voting for. Here in

California we are faced with one man named Simon who's running for

Governor whose a total right-wing, big-money conservative. He's

running against Gray Davis, who calls himself a Democrat, who is

another conservative, big-money individual who sold his soul to the

energy companies and the like. So, you often don't have a vote. I'm

voting for the Green Party candidate, Peter Camejo, just as a protest

vote because neither of these other two people are worth anything.

 

In your book you respond to the often-heard statement that everything

changed after 9-11. What didn't change after September 11?

 

Many of the terrible things we talked about, or if they have changed,

they've changed for the worst. The government is still constantly

looking for ways to restrict our rights and our freedoms. The

government is still giving multibillion-dollar tax write-offs to the

top one percent of the population at the expense of the rest of us.

 

You know every time they get a tax break that means that portion of

the tax burden shifts onto our backs, onto the backs of the ordinary

working people in America.

T

he government is still out there trying to destroy the environment and

undermine the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act as imperfect and

insufficient as those Acts are-trying to roll them back. They're still

trying to go after Social Security. They're still sending troops,

money and military materials all over the world to suppress other

people who are trying to build better lives for their own countries,

trying to get some land reform, trying to get a new kind of government

that would give education to the common people, that refuses to sell

all the public resources off to the big corporations for a song. U.S.

Ieaders, in the service of the big corporations, continue to undermine

movements and governments that are trying to develop in more

democratic ways, responsive to the needs of their people.

So I haven't seen all that much really changing since September 11.

 

Now, of course, for the people who are directly impacted by the

tragedy, who lost loved ones and such, their lives have changed

forever and this is something they'll live with for the rest of their

lives.

 

Do you believe our corporate-capitalist system is reformable? And if

not, what is your vision of an alternative political-economic system

that would be more just and egalitarian?

 

I see I a system in which the people who do the labor, who work and

create the value in society, should be the ones who have the say as to

how it will be used. And that means you've got to have elections that

are not money driven but are really based on issues with clear

alternative perspectives which will allow people to vote. You've got

to have voting systems that are not restrictive, not an obstacle

course designed to disenfranchise the poor and the dissident. You've

got to have free open ballot access to a variety of parties. You

should have proportional representation, which means that if a

political party gets 15 percent of the vote, they will get roughly 15

percent of the representation in the State Assembly or the Congress,

or wherever it may be. You should get rid of the Electoral College,

which elects the president with 550 votes or so. You should have a

direct election of the president by direct popular vote, so that every

vote counts equally regardless of its location.

 

You should also have a whole change in our priorities. The

corporations should be heavily taxed. They used to provide about 20-30

percent of the national revenue, and today they provide more like 6-7

percent, if that. Many of the biggest corporations don't even pay

taxes. They even get a negative tax refund because they haven't paid

any taxes-they have so many tax write offs, they actually get refunded

for taxes they never even paid! What a system.

 

I would also put under public ownership some of the basic industries

in our society: the utilities, the energy companies, and this sort of

thing. I would develop alternative, renewable, sustainable, energy

systems: tidal energy, thermal energy, wind energy, solar power

energy. These things are not pie-in-the-sky things. I hear that by

2030 Germany is going to be moving toward a point where a third or

half of their national energy sources are going to come from wind.

Denmark is doing the same thing. There are countries all over the

world doing the same thing. There are houses in the United States,

literally thousands of them, that are heated either partially are

totally by solar power. One could go on. There's no mystery as to what

could be done. The alternatives are there. They're not just in

blueprints. They're actually being put into operation in communities.

I would support family farming and communal farming, which is often

the safest farming. It's the best, and is often very efficient. It may

not have that immediate, high-powered, mass productivity that the big

agribusiness farms have, but the commodities that come out are usually

safer and cleaner. They're not ridden with genetically engineered

foods or pesticides, or not as much. The family farm and the communal

farm uses the water on its own land so they don't poison it and spray

it to the same degree as big agribusiness. They care for the land. In

the long run they're more efficient. They don't just do cosmetic

farming. They don't just discard a third of the crop because it might

have some scratches on the skin of the potato or it looks irregular in

its shape. They sell those potatoes too.

 

I would democratize our universities so that they're not run by a

small group of rich businessmen who stand with ideological control

over much of the faculty and administration. I would have the

universities run by committees of faculty and administrators and

students and staff, all of them having a say in things. It might be a

little more difficult, sometimes a little messier, sometimes very

wonderful and very rewarding, but it would be at least more

democratic, more creative and more equitable so the universities

wouldn't be serving as instruments of the big corporations as they

increasingly are becoming.

 

That's just scratching the surface. I would take the corporate media

and remind them that they are using the public domain, the airwaves.

These airwaves are the property of the people of the United States. In

fact they now want to sell the airwaves themselves, the actual air.

They want to sell that and make that the private property of the

corporate media. There are plans afoot to do that very thing. They're

going in the other direction. They want to privatize our water

systems, so we have to pay exorbitant prices for our water. There are

now communities in India were these poor struggling families are

paying 30~0 percent of their income just for water. The globalizing

corporate goal is to do the same here. They're looking for commodities

that people can't do without that they can grab hold of. Anything in

the public sector that is being produced by the state, by the

government, for the people, creating jobs and spending power, creating

a tax base, fulfilling human needs- but without making a profit for

the moneyed class-is hated by that class.

 

They want to move in and grab hold of everything, be it education,

health, medical care, water supplies, electrical utilities, whatever

else. Privatize, privatize, deregulate, and hand it over to the

moneybags. They will charge whatever the market will bear. They will

do these sorts of things and the rest of us will be their economic

slaves, working just to buy the basic necessities of life. That's

their goal, the thirdworldization of America-and everywhere else. They

just want to get richer and richer and make us work harder and harder

for less and less. That's what globalization and the " free market " are

all about.

 

David Ross is a grassroots activist who has worked on the Nader

campaign, corporate accountability, U.S. imperialism, and

environmental issues. He can be reached at daveross27.